Stephen Phillips – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Home Office

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Stephen Phillips on 2016-01-20.

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, on how many occasions her Department has been notified by external consultants or other third parties of breaches by employees or subcontractors of those consultants of document retention or security policies relating to confidential or secure materials in each of the last two years.

Karen Bradley

The Home Office has no recorded breaches of material classified as ‘confidential’ or ‘official sensitive’ or above for contractors during the period from January 2014 to date. During this period, in April 2014, the Government Security Classification markings changed from a six-tier protective marking system (unclassified, protect, restricted, confidential, secret and top secret) to a three-tier system (official, secret and top secret). Official – Sensitive is a handling caveat of the ‘Official’ tier in the Government Security Classifications (GSC) Policy. Official-Sensitive is not a separate classification.